Sea Change

by Nancy Kress

  “No visitors except spouses until 8:00 a.m., and after that no one is allowed to see Jake Sanderson except those on the list. Are you on the list?”

  I thought as rapidly as exhaustion permitted. “Yes. I’m his agent, Morgan Tarryn.”

  The dragon possessed an unfortunate knowledge of the movie industry. “You’re not Morgan Tarryn. He’s a man.”

  So much for gender-neutral names. “I meant that I’m with the Morgan Tarryn Agency. He sent me with some important papers for Jake to sign as soon as—”

  “Security! Security!”

  A bored lobby guard sprang to life, followed by a more formidable security bot than the one in Dylan’s building. This one looked like it could handle a Ranger platoon. The human guard said, “What’s the trouble?”

  “She’s trying to fake her way into seeing a patient, and she’s not on his list!”

  The guard squinted at me. The bot was running its tentacles all around my body without actually touching me. Its lights all flashed green. I had no weapons, explosives, or controlled substances. The guard said, “Well, if she’s not on the list, she can’t go up.”

  “That’s what I told her!” the gorgon said triumphantly. “Now, you, leave the building!”

  “She can stay in the lobby,” the guard said. They locked eyes, and I suddenly realized this was a turf war, possibly of long standing. The guard shook his head and said to me scornfully, “Volunteers.”

  Cerberus began to sputter at him, and I retreated to a lobby chair to think what I could do next. Awake for most of the last twenty-four hours, I didn’t even realize when I slipped into cramped and twitchy sleep.

  Daylight flooded the hospital lobby, people bustled through, and Morgan Tarryn stood disbelievingly in front of me. “Renata?”

  “Hello, Morgan. I came to—”

  A good agent is perceptive. “Of course you did. Come on, I’ll take you up.”

  The harpy behind the desk shrieked, “Mr. Tarryn, she’s not on the list!”

  “She is now.”

  Trolls, guards, nurses, even cleaning bots parted before Morgan Tarryn like waves in the Red Sea. In the elevator I said, “How is he?”

  “Okay. Not more than that. The surgery on his spleen was successful, but he’ll need a lot of physical therapy to walk again. And we lost the picture.”

  I didn’t care about the picture. “But he will walk again?”

  “If he works at it. Probably. We’re waiting for the results of some tests.”

  “God, Morgan—”

  “I didn’t know you two still saw each other.”

  His tone alerted me. “Who is she? Is she there now?”

  “No. You’d know if she was there now. Gina Jones.”

  I blinked. Gina Jones was huge, a first-magnitude star, preternaturally beautiful, fifteen years younger than Jake. Or me. All at once I was aware of my ancient jeans, baggy sweater, graying hair.

  A uniformed guard stood outside the door to Jake’s room, but no reporters—not on the list. My first sight of Jake wasn’t good. One leg was up in traction; did that mean he’d injured his spine? His face, never classically handsome, was swollen, bruised, and unshaven, his hair dirty. He looked like a drunk who’d just lost a serious fight.

  But his eyes widened when he saw me, and a light came into them.

  “Renata. What are you doing here?”

  “What are you doing skiing into trees? How stupid is that?”

  “Really stupid. Hey, Morgan.”

  Morgan waved some papers at him. “I just need a minute, Jake, but first I need the bathroom.” He left.

  “The very spirit of tact,” Jake said. “Why are you—”

  “I don’t know. To see just how stupid you actually were. To see that you’re okay, which you don’t look like you are.”

  “It looks worse than it is. My spine is all right. I got the news last night. I’ll walk again, after some physical therapy.”

  I could resume breathing, but it took a moment.

  Jake said softly, “Hey. It’s good of you to come.”

  Our eyes held each other. The moment spun out, both eternal and too short, until I deliberately broke it. “Jake, I stopped in Portland. Dylan won’t see me. Why not?”

  Jake turned his head to look at the ceiling. “My fault.”

  “Yours?”

  “I didn’t handle Dylan well. I gave him hell for getting involved in that evidence theft and blowing his career. He gave me hell for being ‘high and mighty’ about being a success when he’s a failure. It was pretty bad. You’re just collateral damage.”

  Just collateral damage. And I’d made the trip to Portland because I was concerned about Dylan. Anger rose in me, but Jake looked so miserable that I pushed it down and said quietly, “Dylan’s always been jealous of you.”

  “I know.”

  “Not your fault, Jake.”

  “So say you.”

  He turned his head and there it was again, that look in his eyes, that look between us. Something moved in my chest. But before I could say anything, there was a commotion in the hall.

  Not Morgan returning. A big commotion.

  Gina Jones swept into the room with an entourage: bodyguard, publicist, astrologer, sorcerer’s apprentice, or whoever these people were. At 9:00 in the morning, she was in full makeup and a slinky dress, eyeball-kick beautiful. Perfume assaulted my nostrils, musk and gardenia. “Jake! My God, you look awful!”

  “Thanks,” Jake said dryly. The bodyguard was staring at me, assessing. I slipped toward the door.

  Jake didn’t say anything to stop me, for which I was grateful.

  Always good to recognize a lost cause.

  2032: SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

  GRAY CARTER phoned to say he would meet me at his sister-in-law’s house on the reservation, where he and his wife were visiting her family. He gave me careful directions. I had no work reason to drive to the Quinault Nation from Seattle, so I told Jeremy that I didn’t feel well and was going home for the rest of the day.

  “You don’t look well,” he said, which was convenient but unflattering. It was also true. I looked like hell, and compared to the fresh memory of Gina Jones as she bent to kiss Jake, it was a very low circle of hell.

  “Probably just a cold coming on,” I said. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “Get some rest, drink fluids.”

  The weather had turned cold, although October cold in Seattle meant something different than the cold I had grown up with back East. Still, frost made lacy patterns on the windshield of my car, and the Olympic Peninsula would be very wet. I dug out boots and a pea coat from the back of my disorderly closet. From a Keep It Safe! along the way, I opened a lockbox that was not one of the Org’s. However that padded mailer with the toothbrush had gotten into my Org lock-box, its appearance was a deviation from routine. If there had been one deviation, there could be others. I wanted to be prepared. The items from my lockbox fit into my boot.

  By the time I reached the reservation, dark clouds obscured the setting sun. Julie’s family didn’t live in Taholah, but in an isolated cabin. I drove along narrow, unpaved back roads with trees crowding either side and meeting overhead. A tall, unsmiling man met me outside the cabin, and I had the impression he wasn’t pleased to have me there. He insisted on seeing ID before he led me inside. The living room/kitchen had a much more rustic look than Naomi’s house, and some of the furniture looked homemade. Gray sprawled in a chair, reading.

  “Hey, Renata,” he said, rising. “Julie and them have gone visiting. Thanks, Dave.”

  Dave left, still unsmiling. Gray shrugged. “That’s Dave. Never was thrilled with me marrying into the family.”

  It didn’t seem to bother him. Gray had the perfect temperament for a good cop: not excitable, not prone to taking things personally, accepting that the world was not the way he’d like it to be but nonetheless acting as fairly as he could. It was also the perfect temperament for a white man who’d married a member
of a Native tribe.

  “It’s good to see you, Gray.”

  “You, too. But I hope you won’t be offended if I cut this short. I told Julie I’d go on up to her mother’s after I gave you this.” He pulled an index card from his pocket and handed it to me. It had a name that I didn’t recognize and hadn’t expected to: James Allen McKay.

  “I ran him at the station,” Gray said. “No priors, no outstanding warrants, a home address in Olympia. There, I wrote it on the bottom of the card. What’s this about, Renata? Why is Jeremy interested in him? He attack an Indian girl?”

  Married six years to Julie, yet Gray still hadn’t learned to say, “Native American” or “tribal.” I began to see why Julie’s family “wasn’t thrilled.” Yet I knew the marriage was happy.

  April, in my head: People aren’t rational.

  “No, no attack that I know of. Jeremy asked me to get this identity off the DNA but under the table, and he didn’t tell me why. I promise your name will never come up.”

  Gray never took his eyes off me. “I believe you. But you know you can’t use that in court, or any thing it leads to. Fruit of the poisoned tree.”

  “I know. Jeremy knows.”

  “Well, I trust you,” Gray said, and I saw the moment he put the whole thing out of his mind. A talent I often envied, although it also explained why Gray would never make detective.

  In my car, I tried my cell. No coverage. I would have to get closer to Taholah, or back toward Seattle. Impatient, I drove toward the more populated coast.

  Waves lapped at the ocean, but no whitecaps. Water and sky were steel gray, smelling of rain. At a deserted bluff a mile from the village, I got Wi-Fi, entered the tribal password, and Googled James Allen McKay. There wasn’t much, but he was named in a family photo with a laughing woman and a little boy.

  I zoomed in on the picture, squinted at it, tried to make it go away. All at once, the car felt like an iceberg, and I was adrift on it. I recognized James Allen McKay. Floppy hair like pop star Canton Sparks, nose too big to look like Canton Sparks, thin lips, and blue eyes. He was the “cop” in the dark suit who, accompanied by a uniformed officer, had questioned me in the wandering house in Pioneer Square.

  James Allen McKay had used the toothbrush I’d taken from the house. But if he was an Org agent, why would he be outside the house, with another cop?

  No. No.

  I dug further online. I’m not April, but there are tricks you learn to get information that supposedly has been deleted. James Allen McKay worked for the Department of Agriculture Security. For DAS.

  The lost house had been bait. DAS knew—must have known—that eventually someone from the Org would recognize the Tiffany Teal paint on the windowsill. That someone would have the means to enter the locked house, in order to check on whatever agent should be inside. Then all DAS had to do was follow that person, for days or weeks, to see where they went. And I had led them to the carrot station, the teff station, Kyle’s house, the ersatz chess club where our cell met.

  I was the mole, the leaker, the betrayer. Me.

  I pounded my fists on the steering wheel until they screamed with pain.

  No—I had to pull myself together. Think what to do next. Had DAS agents followed me onto tribal lands? Did they know about Joe? Maybe not; Joe had a legitimate job with NOAA that justified his taking samples of algae and ocean water. And it wasn’t that easy to follow someone on tribal lands.

  But—NOAA had had its funding cut, and yet Joe went on sampling. What did DAS make of that? Had I betrayed not only my cell and the scientists at two stations but also Joe Peck?

  I had to warn him. I couldn’t call Kyle because I didn’t have a Caroline Denton phone with me, but I was here, at the Quinault Nation, and I could warn Joe in person. That was a thing I could do. Now.

  He wasn’t on the beach. I didn’t even know where he lived. I drove to Naomi’s.

  “Renata. Why are—” Naomi stopped and looked at me. She took my arm, pulled me in her front door, and closed it. “Tell me.”

  I shook my head, unable for a moment to speak. Then I got out, “Joe.”

  Her fingers tightened on my arm. “Joe? Is he dead?”

  “No, no. I . . . I need to see him. Now.”

  She didn’t ask why. Her sunken eyes searched my face, and then she said, “Wait here. Sit.”

  I did, and she left. Fifteen minutes later, the longest fifteen minutes of my life, she was back with Joe.

  “Tell me,” he said, echoing Naomi. He listened with what seemed to me preternatural calm. Didn’t he realize . . .

  He did.

  “All right,” he said. “They made you. We go now. It’s sooner than we planned, but we’re ready.”

  “Go . . . go where? What’s ready?”

  “Please get her a warmer coat. Really warm. Her boots are okay.”

  Naomi didn’t even ask why. She brought a hooded parka and wool scarf.

  “Joe, what is . . . I don’t understand.”

  “You will. Put those on.”

  I obeyed. I didn’t see any other good options.

  “This way,” Joe said, and led me through the tiny kitchen out the back door.

  It had started to rain. I thought, The Blob will break up now, and wondered that I could, even for a moment, think of anything other than the mess I’d created.

  I stopped under a grove of trees and said, “I’m not going any farther until you tell me where I’m headed.”

  In the rainy dusk, I couldn’t see Joe’s face as he turned toward me. But I heard his voice. “Org regional headquarters.”

  “What?” I couldn’t have heard him right. The rain, the ocean waves on the beach, the hood of my parka . . .

  “We’re going to Org regional HQ. I know you thought I was just an Org grunt, like you. I’m not. Come on, Renata. Move.”

  “But where . . . how . . .”

  “Headquarters is on tribal land. Can you think of a better place to hide something?”

  “But you don’t . . . the tribes don’t . . .”

  “Yes, we do. I do—I’m a scientist. Many tribal members don’t like GMOs, but they know that GMOs are the only thing that might save the land and ocean from the agribusinesses that destroyed them once.”

  The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

  I had always prided myself on my “good instincts” about people. Now I saw that I had none. I had misjudged Joe, had misjudged the Quinault Nation, had misjudged pretty much everyone. And that, I further realized, included Dylan Sanderson.

  Because DAS hadn’t just sent a drivie house to wander aimlessly around Seattle in the hopes that it would encounter a random Org member before city police were called to stop it. That “lost” house had been sent straight to me. That was why it had Tiffany Teal paint on the windowsill. Dylan had committed evidence theft and pleaded guilty, yet he was not in jail. He’d cut a deal. To cut a deal with a district attorney, you had to have something to offer, maybe something more than just the names of two other dirty cops. Dylan had offered me.

  “Come on,” Joe said again, and I followed him through the dark rain, out of Taholah and into the woods.

  “Regional headquarters” was nothing like I had imagined. No large gleaming lab, no army of scientists, no twenty-four-hour armed security. All that must exist elsewhere. And I didn’t know how many regions the Org had, or how much territory each covered.

  We had slogged through what seemed miles of dripping trees, tripping over brush. If there was a trail, I didn’t see it in the thick dark. But Joe moved confidently, sure of where he was going, pulling me along by my rain-slicked hand.

  Headquarters was a wooden cabin, little more than a shack, in deep woods. No road that I could see.

  “This? Joe—”

  He ignored me and fished a D from his pocket. It pinged softly as it unlocked the door. Lights went on inside, and I could see that the D in his hand looked nothing like mine. Not just any Org member could get in here.


  The inside, including the door, was a concrete bunker with a steel door. A Quinault woman in jeans and heavy wool sweater rose from the only chair, which faced a computer with a coffee machine beside it. One corner held a bed, small refrigerator, reading lamp. Nothing else.

  She said, “Joe?” And then, “Oh, gods—now?”

  “Yes. I’ve been compromised.”

  “You? Who else?”

  “I don’t know. But if they’ve found me, they’ve found most of—”

  “I know.” She stared at me hard. “Who’s this? Was she the breach?”

  “Not her fault. Catherine, we have to launch now.”

  “How much?”

  Joe hesitated; his face said this was a critical, irreversible decision that had to be made. “All of it.”

  “Okay.” She sat at the computer and began to key. Two more screens lit up. The computer said in a mechanical voice, “Satellite contact.”

  “Joe,” I said, because it was impossible to stay silent, “if you contact a satellite, won’t DAS be able to—”

  “Yes,” he said. And then, “Wait.”

  The computer said, “Missiles armed.”

  Missiles? My breath tangled in my throat and would not come out.

  Joe took pity on me. “Not warheads.”

  Catherine gave a short, bitter laugh.

  More commands, more typing, and she rose. “Done. Let’s go.”

  Nothing seemed to have happened. I stood, ignorant as grass, and as helpless. Catherine shrugged into a jacket and picked up a paperback book: The Gulag Archipelago. She put it in her pocket, opened the door, and, without a word to either of us, melted into the woods.

  I followed Joe outside and away from the cabin. “You didn’t lock the door.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Come on. They’ll be here soon.”

  He meant DAS. I said, “So they did follow me? By drone?”

  “Probably. But either way, they’ll come here soon. Get behind that tree.”

  It was a huge sycamore, a few leaves still on the branches and writhing in the rain. I moved partly behind it, watching Joe.